#02x23

Season 2 Episode 23:  Who's Your Daddy?

1/2

So I decided to watch The Hunger Artist this morning. Of all the episodes of all the seasons I suppose I find this one among the saddest and the most poetic.

In some 40 minutes, it is an eloquent essay on symmetry and secrets and self-destruction.

It's also backwards story-telling. Early on, we see Grissom cancel a doctor's appointment. Not far into the investigation, we see one of Grissom's secrets: he is drawn to Sara like a moth to a flame. Once in her presence, they engage in symmetrical, choreographed movements as they seek to make sense of the why Ashleigh ended up in that spot.

The original assumption is that someone has maimed and killed Ashleigh, but the investigation leads the CSIs to the opposite conclusion. Ashleigh's own insecurities and misperceptions about her face and body have driven her to destroy herself by trying to improve herself.

When Sara breaks the code in her day planner, it is all about the drive for symmetry. Ashleigh perceived that she was asymmetrical, and she took great pains to try to balance what she saw as the out of balance aspects of her face and body, which just wasn't good enough. In so doing she destroyed the body she was trying to repair.

As Sara presents her explanation of what Ashleigh was trying to attain, Grissom waxes poetic on the importance of symmetry, especially in one's mate, which recalls the symmetrical "dance" between him and Sara at beginning of the episode.

One of the suspects is Ashleigh's schizophrenic former model sister, Cassie, who, after falling into the abyss of drug addiction, is now homeless. Since Ashleigh replaced Cassie at the top of the modeling world, the theory is that she may have killed her sister out of jealousy and revenge.

Again the truth is the opposite. Cassie tried to save her sister from herself. While we are not privy to the sisters' interactions before the last day of Ashleigh's life, there is the very real possibility that Cassie tried to warn her about what she was doing to herself. As with Grissom, she probably spoke in riddles.

All of Grissom's interactions with Cassie seem to me to be both mystical and mythic. She is a modern Cassandra who speaks truth no one understands. The last conversation between the two of them is uncannily parallel to some of the things Heather perceived about him.

Grissom: I'm sorry about your sister, Cassie.

Cassie James: The dead don't bleed.

Grissom: True. Death does have some advantages. Would you like me to help you get in a shelter?

Cassie James: No, I would need a shelter from a shelter. No, no, no. Out here, I can hunt and I can range and I can find the things that I need out here. I mean, you never know what you need until you find it.

Grissom: Or until you lose it.

Cassie James: I mean, all we are is what we try to get rid of. Fat and newspapers and loneliness and cat food cans. And there are going-away people and there are left-behind people but, you know, everybody's secrets ... everybody's secrets are the same.

Grissom: Were your and your sister's secrets the same?

Cassie James: My sister didn't have secrets. Her secrets had her. That... I told you I didn't ... I don't know. I mean, you know, y-y-you-you can pick through a million lives and never have one of your own.

Grissom: Looking for things, analyzing them ... trying to figure out the world -- that's a life.

Cassie James: You never know what you need until you find it. And the next thing I find it might be the thing that changes everything.

Grissom: What will you do when you find it?

Cassie James: Sleep ... the most perfect sleep.

Two lines struck me this time through in ways they never did before. Cassie saying her sister didn't have secrets; her secrets had her. At this point in his life, Grissom is too a prisoner of his secrets: that he is in love with Sara and that he is going deaf (the fact of which is confirmed for us at the very end of the episode when he finally sees the doctor.)

The other line is when Cassie first says that you never know what you need until you find it, and Grissom says, "Or until you lose it." This is such double-edged foreshadowing. At the beginning of the next season he will learn he has lost Sara to Hank. Then, when he is given another chance with her, he turns her down, primarily, we learn in Butterflied, because he is afraid of losing everything.

Still, at this point, he reasserts that his existence as a scientist and a CSI is a life, and Cassie repeats that you never know what you need until you find it. And that when you do find it, it will change everything.